Click on the headline to link to a Sunday Boston Globe, dated July 4, 2010, guest book review of Bret Eason Ellis' latest novel.
Markin comment:
The reason that I am posting this guest review is that the reviewer's (Jay Atkinson) first paragraph hits the nail right on the head about the dearth of sympathetic (or even likable) characters that populate most contemporary literature:
"Sometime in the 1970s, when money and power became mixed up in the counterculture, it all went horribly wrong, in literature and in life. The primary books that celebrate this intriguing aspect of Americana, works by writers like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Carroll — even Whitman and Thoreau — often featured charismatic quasi-hoboes as their protagonists, enlightened seekers in pursuit of “joy, kicks, darkness, music,’’ in Kerouac’s famous expression. These penniless hipsters were not looking for freedom from authority so much as freedom from oppression; for the most part, they were willing to live, and let live."
Does anyone else have that same sense? Or sense of the decline of "hobo" sensibility.
Neal Cassady from Kerouac Denver, "The Brown Buffalo", Oscar Acosta, from Thompson California, Duane from McMurtry Texas, McMurphy from Kesey Oregon, Hell, even Faulkner crazies from Mississippi and Tennessee Williams misfit from all over the South. I could go on. Where have they gone in techno-America? At least they could have left an e-mail address. Right?
Showing posts with label literature and revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature and revolution. Show all posts
Monday, July 05, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Poet's Corner- Osip Mandelstam's "Epigram Against Stalin"- A Guest Review
Click on the headline to link to a guest review article on the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, especially a close reading of his "Epigram Against Stalin" for which he paid dearly with his life.
Markin comment:
As a follower of the great anti-Stalinist, pro-communist fighter, and Bolshevik Revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, I am all too familiar with the "night of the long knives" Moscow Trials period described here. Our Russian Left Oppositionists (Communists) forebears fought Stalin politically, as best they could. Mandelstam fought with his pen, as best he could. Although a vast gulf separates his ideas from ours we can appreciate his anti-Stalin poem. The story behind it is fascinating, as laid out in the article. Stalin, not known as one of nature's noblemen, obviously would chaff under this poem. When the deal went down Mandelstam, unlike someone like Boris Paternak, paid with his life for his art. We definitely can appreciate that.
Markin comment:
As a follower of the great anti-Stalinist, pro-communist fighter, and Bolshevik Revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, I am all too familiar with the "night of the long knives" Moscow Trials period described here. Our Russian Left Oppositionists (Communists) forebears fought Stalin politically, as best they could. Mandelstam fought with his pen, as best he could. Although a vast gulf separates his ideas from ours we can appreciate his anti-Stalin poem. The story behind it is fascinating, as laid out in the article. Stalin, not known as one of nature's noblemen, obviously would chaff under this poem. When the deal went down Mandelstam, unlike someone like Boris Paternak, paid with his life for his art. We definitely can appreciate that.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-On Language and Liberation
Click on the headline to link a website that features George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."
Markin comment:
On a day when I am featuring George Orwells's "Politics and the English Language" the following article dealing with the specifics of current politcal language usage (1995, but still appropriate today)seems timely.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1995 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
*****************
On Language and Liberation
We print below an excerpted exchange between a reader of Women and Revolution and a member of our editorial board.
Montreal, Quebec [undated, received July 1994]
To whom it may concern,
As a recently new reader of the Spartacist League's journal "Workers Vanguard" as well as the journal (of the Women's League of the SL), "Women and Revolution," I am very inspired, encouraged, and impressed with your organisation's anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic integration with very clear Marxist principles which seek to destroy a class-based, capitalist society and the inequities it creates. I, however, am puzzled by something I noticed in "Women and Revolution" which, though seemingly trivial, is I think very important to any Marxist publication and especially one which chooses to focus on the "woman question."
I noticed that throughout "Women and Revolution" you consistently use the term "mankind" as opposed to people or humankind. While I anticipate your defense of this practice to claim that language or terms are a mild bandaid (or not the true problem) rather than a solution to sexism, I have a few reasons why I think language is an important issue in battling sexism.
First, language is not solely a means of communication. It is also an expression of shared assumptions and transmits implicit values and behavioural models to those who use it. Therefore, to use "mankind" implies that people are men—this renders women invisible in a very literal and symbolic way and serves to perpetuate an androcentric society.
Secondly, since language both reflects and creates social norms and values; that is, "if it plays a crucial part in social organisation it is instrumental in maintaining male power..." (Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory [1985]} and Marxists, in deconstructing sexism as an integral tool of capitalist oppression, must study its workings carefully. While, obviously, gender-neutral language will not eradicate sexism, it is a very important aspect in social transformation. To say something is not worth implementing because it does not provide complete success instantly, is like saying that since international expansion is integral to a successful Marxist revolution, it is not worth starting a movement or mobilization in one country.
Finally, if indeed "mankind" means everyone and language or terms are trivial, then why all the resistance to changing it? If you were to substitute "womankind" for "mankind" or "she" for "he," your readers would assume you meant only women and would (with reason) question your motives. If it is truly not a "big deal," then why the insistence on continuing a practice which perpetuates sexist and androcentric images and values?
While I understand your organisation's focus is class-based, I assume, by your journal "Women and Revolution" as well as your anti-sexist stance in all your activities, that eradicating sexism both as a special oppression and as a tool and product of capitalism is an important issue for you. As a result, considering my argument outlined above, I urge you to contemplate your use of the term "mankind" and the larger issue of language in general.
Sincerely, Jasmine C.
Vancouver, British Columbia 27 August 1994
Dear Jasmine,
Thank you for your interesting letter to Women and Revolution forwarded here by my colleagues in New York. I assure you, political debates about language are not trivial. We share an understanding that opposition to all forms of oppression is integral to the Marxist program which indeed seeks to destroy "class-based capitalist society and the inequities it creates." And that is the framework in which I will address your concerns about W&R's use of language, especially words like "mankind."
It's true that changing language is not a "solution to sexism." It's not even a "mild bandaid." But this is not why we oppose "political linguistics." Rather, the sustained effort by feminist linguists to change language with the aim of partially or wholly addressing social inequities, embodies a political program that is counterposed to the necessary social struggle against social, racial and sexual oppression. It is based on the false premise that by changing how people speak, we can change how they act. This is idealism: proceeding from what is in people's heads, their ideas and the language in which they express those ideas, rather than the social reality that creates and conditions the ideas. As Karl Marx said, "'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act."
Language mirrors social reality and is a vehicle for communicating ideas, a powerful instrument of human culture. It can as easily convey a liberating revolutionary program as a reactionary one. But language doesn't create social reality, or as you say, "social norms and values."
We disagree with Deborah Cameron that language is instrumental in maintaining male power, and with Dale Spender, another feminist linguist, that language causes women's oppression. Women's oppression is deeply rooted in the institution of the family, economic unit and guardian of private property in capitalist society. It's really not a matter of words and ideas and language. It is capitalist exploitation and private property that are central to the maintenance of women's oppression. Our struggle as communists is to transform that social reality through proletarian socialist revolution.
That said, I agree that language can have a political program. Two examples will illustrate this. When anti-abortion terrorists hurl words like "baby killer" at women seeking abortions and the doctors performing them, this is an action program for murder which is being carried out. Racist epithets and code words for terror against blacks, Asians and Jews can incite pogroms and lynching. But stopping that race-terror is not a matter of linguistics but of mobilizing the integrated working class in action to stop the Klan and Nazi fascists.
Until 1977 we didn't use "gay" to refer to homosexuals, except in quotes, because we did not consider gay as a neutral or conventional synonym for homosexual. But we began using gay because, while homosexual was and still is an adequate term, it became impossible to refer to a whole range of cultural/political activities without use of the word gay. Yet it still does not refer to homosexuality in all contexts (ancient Rome, for example, or Iran where homosexuals are anything but gay). Nor does it describe a variety of sexual orientations and interests (e.g., lesbian women and bisexuals). American author Core Vidal's elegant solution was to speak of "same sex sex" which is both accurate and explicit. We explained our political rationale when we announced the style change in Workers Vanguard:
"The term was promoted by and gained public currency in the last decade due to the gay liberation movement. The general program of the gay liberation movement is not so much fighting for democratic rights for homosexuals as the affirmation of 'gay pride.' As a political rather than purely personal statement, 'gay pride' represents a sectoralist outlook fundamentally hostile to Marxism and detrimental to the struggle for a united mobilization of the working class and all defenders of democratic rights against discrimination and social oppression....
"Our resistance to using the term gay was also derived from opposition to New Left moralistic idealism in general, one aspect of which has been a tendency to reject the conventional terms relating to oppressed social groups in favor of new terms, often quite artificial in appearance (e.g., chairperson). As Marxists we oppose such termino-
conservative attitude toward conventional usage. Thus we used Negro rather than black until Negro generally acquired an obsolete or derogatory meaning and black became conventional usage. We still do not use the term 'Ms.,' a form of address closely associated with feminism and based on an amalgamation of traditional aristocratic-derived, sex-defined terminology (as opposed to the democratic 'citizen' or the communist 'comrade')."
—WV No. 168, 29 July 1977
We also don't use "choice" to refer to a woman's right to abortion. "Choice" is insisted upon by the petty-bourgeois feminists of CARAL in Canada, and NOW and NARAL in the U.S. They speak of "a woman's right to choose" and call out the well-worn slogan, "Control of our bodies, control of our lives." Posing the struggle for abortion rights as a matter of "choice" is the political program of the petty bourgeoisie. It intentionally masks reality. Abortion is a medical procedure. It is a democratic right, and should be available free and on demand. For teenagers and for poor, minority and working-class women the decision to have an abortion is an often painful economic or medical necessity. A "choice" perhaps, but not one freely made. The "pro-choice" feminists appeal to their well-heeled sisters in the bourgeoisie who in any case can always afford abortions. They call on Clinton's cops to defend the clinics in the U.S., while in Canada they also preach reliance on the state, especially if the attorney general is an NDP [New Democratic Party] social democrat. In the context of medicine-for-profit, these feminists will not fight for free abortion on demand. And nothing less than that will provide "choice" for the vast majority of working-class women.
Now to the thorny question of "mankind." In flipping through W&R I see a variety of words and expressions to denote the whole of homo sapiens, men and women: mankind, human beings, humanity, humankind, people, all people, women and men. "Mankind" is not inherently anti-woman. Its dictionary definition is "the human species...human beings in general." "Humankind" has a similar meaning: "the human race, mankind." By the way, in French "mankind" translates as "I'humanite," a feminine noun, while the German word is more akin to the English: "die Menschheit," also a feminine noun. As for "man," the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition is "a human being (irrespective of sex or age)" and their historical backup is this piquant quote from a 17th century writer: "The Lord had but one paire of men in Paradise"!
I'm sure you would be interested in the question of language in Japan. This is a very hierarchical country where women's oppression is profound and permeates every aspect of social life, including language. At an early age boys learn to add a particle at the end of a sentence to indicate their definite opinion, while girls are taught to add other particles which convey hesitation, deference and politeness, literally codifying and enforcing female inferiority and oppression. A Japanese grammar tells us that "Some of these particles are used exclusively by male or exclusively by female speakers, so they also function to mark the speaker's sex." This is an example of "conventional usage" that our comrades in Japan would avoid and in an egalitarian workers' Japan it would quickly disappear.
After the 1917 October Revolution the Russian language changed considerably, becoming both simpler (fewer letters in the alphabet, for example) and more egalitarian. In tsarist Russia, the familiar second person singular (you/ty) was used by the nobility towards servants, peasants and workers, but the latter were expected to respond in the more respectful mode of the second person plural (you/vy). This reactionary social convention was overthrown first in the army and in the factories. Leon Trotsky described the new, revolutionary order in the Red Army: "Of course, Red Army personnel may use the familiar form in speaking to one another as comrades, but precisely as comrades and only as comrades. In the Red Army a commanding officer may not use the familiar form to address a subordinate if the subordinate is expected to respond in the polite form. Otherwise an expression of inequality between persons would result, not an expression of subordination in the line of duty."
—Problems of Everyday Life
After the Stalinist political counterrevolution the bureaucracy fostered a recrudescence of the old tsarist forms of address. In his decisive analysis of Stalinism, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky voiced his outrage at the reemergence of this practice:
"How can they fail to remember that one of the most popular revolutionary slogans in tzarist Russia was the demand for the abolition of the use of the second person singular by bosses in addressing their subordinates!"
Contemporary feminism has had some impact on the language, but this has not translated into even token improvements for women in the realm of social equality, abortion rights, jobs, or an amelioration of the unremitting violence that so many women so routinely face. Even as the bourgeois media, employers and governments implement "gender-neutral" language, we are witnessing a real degradation of women's rights and lives. This is a product both of the capitalist economy utterly going down the tubes, and of the social counterrevolution in the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And "gender-neutral" language can express reactionary, anti-woman bigotry. I heard a really horrifying example of this on the radio the other day. A professor at a provincial college is accused of sexual harassment. In the radio interview, he used quite "correct" language to say that women belong at home and blacks have low IQs!
I agree with your arguments against those who say that something is not worth implementing because it does not provide complete success instantly. Thus we struggle for abortion rights and mobilize ourselves and others at the besieged clinics. We fight for full democratic rights for gays and lesbians. We oppose the ruling class' anti-sex crusade, which hits women and gays most viciously. We seek to mobilize the multiracial working class to struggle against the racist immigration laws. We've organized numerous integrated working-class actions which have stopped the fascists from marching. In all the battles in defense of workers and the oppressed, we aim to lay bare the inner workings of capitalism and to link such struggles to the necessity for the working class to take power in its own name. That's when we can begin to lay the material basis for the true liberation of women and all humanity.
Communist greetings,
Miriam McDonald
for Women and Revolution
Markin comment:
On a day when I am featuring George Orwells's "Politics and the English Language" the following article dealing with the specifics of current politcal language usage (1995, but still appropriate today)seems timely.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1995 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
*****************
On Language and Liberation
We print below an excerpted exchange between a reader of Women and Revolution and a member of our editorial board.
Montreal, Quebec [undated, received July 1994]
To whom it may concern,
As a recently new reader of the Spartacist League's journal "Workers Vanguard" as well as the journal (of the Women's League of the SL), "Women and Revolution," I am very inspired, encouraged, and impressed with your organisation's anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic integration with very clear Marxist principles which seek to destroy a class-based, capitalist society and the inequities it creates. I, however, am puzzled by something I noticed in "Women and Revolution" which, though seemingly trivial, is I think very important to any Marxist publication and especially one which chooses to focus on the "woman question."
I noticed that throughout "Women and Revolution" you consistently use the term "mankind" as opposed to people or humankind. While I anticipate your defense of this practice to claim that language or terms are a mild bandaid (or not the true problem) rather than a solution to sexism, I have a few reasons why I think language is an important issue in battling sexism.
First, language is not solely a means of communication. It is also an expression of shared assumptions and transmits implicit values and behavioural models to those who use it. Therefore, to use "mankind" implies that people are men—this renders women invisible in a very literal and symbolic way and serves to perpetuate an androcentric society.
Secondly, since language both reflects and creates social norms and values; that is, "if it plays a crucial part in social organisation it is instrumental in maintaining male power..." (Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory [1985]} and Marxists, in deconstructing sexism as an integral tool of capitalist oppression, must study its workings carefully. While, obviously, gender-neutral language will not eradicate sexism, it is a very important aspect in social transformation. To say something is not worth implementing because it does not provide complete success instantly, is like saying that since international expansion is integral to a successful Marxist revolution, it is not worth starting a movement or mobilization in one country.
Finally, if indeed "mankind" means everyone and language or terms are trivial, then why all the resistance to changing it? If you were to substitute "womankind" for "mankind" or "she" for "he," your readers would assume you meant only women and would (with reason) question your motives. If it is truly not a "big deal," then why the insistence on continuing a practice which perpetuates sexist and androcentric images and values?
While I understand your organisation's focus is class-based, I assume, by your journal "Women and Revolution" as well as your anti-sexist stance in all your activities, that eradicating sexism both as a special oppression and as a tool and product of capitalism is an important issue for you. As a result, considering my argument outlined above, I urge you to contemplate your use of the term "mankind" and the larger issue of language in general.
Sincerely, Jasmine C.
Vancouver, British Columbia 27 August 1994
Dear Jasmine,
Thank you for your interesting letter to Women and Revolution forwarded here by my colleagues in New York. I assure you, political debates about language are not trivial. We share an understanding that opposition to all forms of oppression is integral to the Marxist program which indeed seeks to destroy "class-based capitalist society and the inequities it creates." And that is the framework in which I will address your concerns about W&R's use of language, especially words like "mankind."
It's true that changing language is not a "solution to sexism." It's not even a "mild bandaid." But this is not why we oppose "political linguistics." Rather, the sustained effort by feminist linguists to change language with the aim of partially or wholly addressing social inequities, embodies a political program that is counterposed to the necessary social struggle against social, racial and sexual oppression. It is based on the false premise that by changing how people speak, we can change how they act. This is idealism: proceeding from what is in people's heads, their ideas and the language in which they express those ideas, rather than the social reality that creates and conditions the ideas. As Karl Marx said, "'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act."
Language mirrors social reality and is a vehicle for communicating ideas, a powerful instrument of human culture. It can as easily convey a liberating revolutionary program as a reactionary one. But language doesn't create social reality, or as you say, "social norms and values."
We disagree with Deborah Cameron that language is instrumental in maintaining male power, and with Dale Spender, another feminist linguist, that language causes women's oppression. Women's oppression is deeply rooted in the institution of the family, economic unit and guardian of private property in capitalist society. It's really not a matter of words and ideas and language. It is capitalist exploitation and private property that are central to the maintenance of women's oppression. Our struggle as communists is to transform that social reality through proletarian socialist revolution.
That said, I agree that language can have a political program. Two examples will illustrate this. When anti-abortion terrorists hurl words like "baby killer" at women seeking abortions and the doctors performing them, this is an action program for murder which is being carried out. Racist epithets and code words for terror against blacks, Asians and Jews can incite pogroms and lynching. But stopping that race-terror is not a matter of linguistics but of mobilizing the integrated working class in action to stop the Klan and Nazi fascists.
Until 1977 we didn't use "gay" to refer to homosexuals, except in quotes, because we did not consider gay as a neutral or conventional synonym for homosexual. But we began using gay because, while homosexual was and still is an adequate term, it became impossible to refer to a whole range of cultural/political activities without use of the word gay. Yet it still does not refer to homosexuality in all contexts (ancient Rome, for example, or Iran where homosexuals are anything but gay). Nor does it describe a variety of sexual orientations and interests (e.g., lesbian women and bisexuals). American author Core Vidal's elegant solution was to speak of "same sex sex" which is both accurate and explicit. We explained our political rationale when we announced the style change in Workers Vanguard:
"The term was promoted by and gained public currency in the last decade due to the gay liberation movement. The general program of the gay liberation movement is not so much fighting for democratic rights for homosexuals as the affirmation of 'gay pride.' As a political rather than purely personal statement, 'gay pride' represents a sectoralist outlook fundamentally hostile to Marxism and detrimental to the struggle for a united mobilization of the working class and all defenders of democratic rights against discrimination and social oppression....
"Our resistance to using the term gay was also derived from opposition to New Left moralistic idealism in general, one aspect of which has been a tendency to reject the conventional terms relating to oppressed social groups in favor of new terms, often quite artificial in appearance (e.g., chairperson). As Marxists we oppose such termino-
conservative attitude toward conventional usage. Thus we used Negro rather than black until Negro generally acquired an obsolete or derogatory meaning and black became conventional usage. We still do not use the term 'Ms.,' a form of address closely associated with feminism and based on an amalgamation of traditional aristocratic-derived, sex-defined terminology (as opposed to the democratic 'citizen' or the communist 'comrade')."
—WV No. 168, 29 July 1977
We also don't use "choice" to refer to a woman's right to abortion. "Choice" is insisted upon by the petty-bourgeois feminists of CARAL in Canada, and NOW and NARAL in the U.S. They speak of "a woman's right to choose" and call out the well-worn slogan, "Control of our bodies, control of our lives." Posing the struggle for abortion rights as a matter of "choice" is the political program of the petty bourgeoisie. It intentionally masks reality. Abortion is a medical procedure. It is a democratic right, and should be available free and on demand. For teenagers and for poor, minority and working-class women the decision to have an abortion is an often painful economic or medical necessity. A "choice" perhaps, but not one freely made. The "pro-choice" feminists appeal to their well-heeled sisters in the bourgeoisie who in any case can always afford abortions. They call on Clinton's cops to defend the clinics in the U.S., while in Canada they also preach reliance on the state, especially if the attorney general is an NDP [New Democratic Party] social democrat. In the context of medicine-for-profit, these feminists will not fight for free abortion on demand. And nothing less than that will provide "choice" for the vast majority of working-class women.
Now to the thorny question of "mankind." In flipping through W&R I see a variety of words and expressions to denote the whole of homo sapiens, men and women: mankind, human beings, humanity, humankind, people, all people, women and men. "Mankind" is not inherently anti-woman. Its dictionary definition is "the human species...human beings in general." "Humankind" has a similar meaning: "the human race, mankind." By the way, in French "mankind" translates as "I'humanite," a feminine noun, while the German word is more akin to the English: "die Menschheit," also a feminine noun. As for "man," the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition is "a human being (irrespective of sex or age)" and their historical backup is this piquant quote from a 17th century writer: "The Lord had but one paire of men in Paradise"!
I'm sure you would be interested in the question of language in Japan. This is a very hierarchical country where women's oppression is profound and permeates every aspect of social life, including language. At an early age boys learn to add a particle at the end of a sentence to indicate their definite opinion, while girls are taught to add other particles which convey hesitation, deference and politeness, literally codifying and enforcing female inferiority and oppression. A Japanese grammar tells us that "Some of these particles are used exclusively by male or exclusively by female speakers, so they also function to mark the speaker's sex." This is an example of "conventional usage" that our comrades in Japan would avoid and in an egalitarian workers' Japan it would quickly disappear.
After the 1917 October Revolution the Russian language changed considerably, becoming both simpler (fewer letters in the alphabet, for example) and more egalitarian. In tsarist Russia, the familiar second person singular (you/ty) was used by the nobility towards servants, peasants and workers, but the latter were expected to respond in the more respectful mode of the second person plural (you/vy). This reactionary social convention was overthrown first in the army and in the factories. Leon Trotsky described the new, revolutionary order in the Red Army: "Of course, Red Army personnel may use the familiar form in speaking to one another as comrades, but precisely as comrades and only as comrades. In the Red Army a commanding officer may not use the familiar form to address a subordinate if the subordinate is expected to respond in the polite form. Otherwise an expression of inequality between persons would result, not an expression of subordination in the line of duty."
—Problems of Everyday Life
After the Stalinist political counterrevolution the bureaucracy fostered a recrudescence of the old tsarist forms of address. In his decisive analysis of Stalinism, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky voiced his outrage at the reemergence of this practice:
"How can they fail to remember that one of the most popular revolutionary slogans in tzarist Russia was the demand for the abolition of the use of the second person singular by bosses in addressing their subordinates!"
Contemporary feminism has had some impact on the language, but this has not translated into even token improvements for women in the realm of social equality, abortion rights, jobs, or an amelioration of the unremitting violence that so many women so routinely face. Even as the bourgeois media, employers and governments implement "gender-neutral" language, we are witnessing a real degradation of women's rights and lives. This is a product both of the capitalist economy utterly going down the tubes, and of the social counterrevolution in the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And "gender-neutral" language can express reactionary, anti-woman bigotry. I heard a really horrifying example of this on the radio the other day. A professor at a provincial college is accused of sexual harassment. In the radio interview, he used quite "correct" language to say that women belong at home and blacks have low IQs!
I agree with your arguments against those who say that something is not worth implementing because it does not provide complete success instantly. Thus we struggle for abortion rights and mobilize ourselves and others at the besieged clinics. We fight for full democratic rights for gays and lesbians. We oppose the ruling class' anti-sex crusade, which hits women and gays most viciously. We seek to mobilize the multiracial working class to struggle against the racist immigration laws. We've organized numerous integrated working-class actions which have stopped the fascists from marching. In all the battles in defense of workers and the oppressed, we aim to lay bare the inner workings of capitalism and to link such struggles to the necessity for the working class to take power in its own name. That's when we can begin to lay the material basis for the true liberation of women and all humanity.
Communist greetings,
Miriam McDonald
for Women and Revolution
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- From The Pen Of George Bernard Shaw
Click on the title to link to an "HistoMat" blog entry concerning George Bernard Shaw's views on communism.
Markin comment:
I will, and gladly, go see any play that George Bernard Shaw wrote, but I am still waiting, impatiently, for he and his Fabian associates', the Webbs, Cole, Brailsford, Wells, etc., vision of the slow, very slow and methodical road to socialism (never) to occur. Hurry along now, better yet, let's talk Bolshevik to take our communist birthright sooner.
Markin comment:
I will, and gladly, go see any play that George Bernard Shaw wrote, but I am still waiting, impatiently, for he and his Fabian associates', the Webbs, Cole, Brailsford, Wells, etc., vision of the slow, very slow and methodical road to socialism (never) to occur. Hurry along now, better yet, let's talk Bolshevik to take our communist birthright sooner.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Art And The Bolshevik Revolution
Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for the Russian Constructivists.
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Russian Avant-Garde:
Art and the Bolshevik Revolution
by Vladimir Zelinski
Two recent American exhibitions—"The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930—New Perspectives" 1980 national tour, and this winter's Guggenheim Museum show in New York City, part of the George Costakis collection—reveal an incredibly vital and heterogeneous movement. In the period from roughly 1916-17 to 1924, the paintings, constructions and industrial designs of a host of talented artists placed Russian art, before (and thereafter) a derivative and provincial backwater, at the leading edge of 20th century creativity in the arts. The whole Bauhaus school, in particular, is incomprehensible without the influence of the Russian Constructivists and "production artists," transmitted by such figures as Kandinsky and El Lissitzky.
This movement was largely ignored in the West for almost half a century until its first major Western exhibit in London in 1971. Today such exhibits are promoted and armed with a mendacious anti-Communist "message": the bourgeois media disappear the social relation of this art to the October Revolution and pretend that it was repressed in revolutionary Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. In fact the avant-garde was literally disappeared—but only under triumphant Stalinism. During the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, the revolutionary artists were transformed into non-persons and then plucked from obscurity and subjected to frenzied attacks on their supposed degenerate "bourgeois formalism" by Stalin's culture boss Zhdanov.
The reason is simple: though art is not "political" in a direct sense, this art in its own way is political dynamite. It gives the lie to the equation of Leninism with Stalinism, connived at by capitalist ideologues and Stalinist hacks alike ever since the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was smashed. Time has not defused the political impact of these fine works. Their exhibition in the USSR today would reveal the stunning mediocrity of "official art" (as well as the sorry state of "dissident" and "non-conformist" artistic production). It would also inevitably raise deeply embarrassing and (for the usurping bureaucrats) unanswerable questions. What happened to these artists? Why was genuinely great art possible in Russia in the early '20s, in the midst of incredible backwardness and massive poverty, but not now, under conditions of relative material plenty and technological progress?
Art and Society
Since bourgeois patrons were obviously lacking, clearly the government and cultural institutions of the infant Soviet workers state had to play a central role in supporting this art, an art whose abstractness and aura of airiness and radiant optimism place it at far remove from the dogmas and products of Stalinist "socialist realism."
Russian " revolutionary" art did not, of course, spring from the head of Lenin. The bourgeois media would like to suggest that there is little if any relationship between the Bolsheviks' successful October Revolution and the cultural explosion of 1917-25. But there are in fact numerous ties, going back all the way to the 1850s artistic revolt against the hitherto dominant neo¬classical tradition. This is not to say that Russian painters and writers were necessarily Marxist. Rather they inevitably mirrored the travail of a society groaning beneath the yoke of a tsarist autocracy incapable of effecting Russia's passage into the mainstream of bourgeois economic, political and cultural development.
The author of the main work leading to the founding of the Russian realist school, The Aesthetic Relation of An to Reality, was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, better known among revolutionaries for his seminal novel What Is To Be Done?, which so profoundly moved and influenced a generation of Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Chernyshevsky's belief that it was necessary to forestall "the accusation that art is an empty diversion" through imbuing it with social content was characteristic of the radical intelligentsia.
Thus the "Wanderers" grouping of artists founded under Chernyshevsky's influence in 1870grew along lines strikingly similar to those of overtly political groupings. Many of its members, like the Populists, "went to the people" and elevated the Russian peasant, mired in his immemorial priest-ridden backwardness, as hero of the new art. Wealthy Slavophile merchants supported artistic colonies (Abramtsevo and Talashkino) whose residents sought inspiration in a William Morris-ish arts-and-craftsy revival of moribund Byzantine tradition or the primitive folk art of lubok (chapbook) woodcuts.
Around the turn of the century a symbolist school arose influenced by the fin-du-siecle "decadents" of the West. Although reflecting the increasing cultural sophistication of their patrons, such artists as Viktor Borrisov-Mussatov succeeded only in producing yet paler copies of the already effete Puvis de Chavannes, elegiac paintings of abandoned country mansions and empty-gazed demoiselles—works which with hindsight one is tempted to assert expressed (like much of Chekhov) the consciousness of a merchant/ landholding gentry lacking an historic future. And art-for-art's-sake withdrawal from social concerns also arose, partly reflecting Russian artists' sense of futility at the intelligentsia's failure to transform society by literary means.
This "World of Art," centered around the multi-talented Aleksandr Benois, nonetheless laid the foundations for future developments, mounting a series of exhibitions that introduced contemporary European art to Russian painters and young Russian artists to a wider public.
The Great Experiment
The first expressions of the coming breakthrough appeared between 1905-1917, with the rise of a gifted and innovative younger generation of painters. Their openness to experimentation, derived partly from the German expressionists and French cubists, arose also from the sudden sense of release generated even in defeat by the great proletarian upsurge of the 1905 Revolution. (See "Before 'Socialist Realism' in the Soviet Union," W&R No. 13, Winter 1976-77, for a discussion of this burst of creativity in other artistic areas, notably dance and theater.)
This feeling that the whole anachronistic edifice of tsarism was crumbling inspired in these artists a will to radically reshape art and its relation to society. Seeking through scientific inquiry into the interaction of planes, volumes, color, overall structuring of the canvas and their effects on the viewer to discover laws inherent to art, they rejected the naturalistic tradition (in which even cubism remained based). This was the program that, despite factional differences, united the Russian avant-garde right down to their repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence the rationalism of this art, its tendency toward a radical geometricizing simplification.
The art of the Russian avant-garde thus to an extent anticipated the revolution to whose ideals it lent expression: a fundamental faith in man's capacity to rationally reshape society, doing away with the material and intellectual compulsion springing from the anarchy and inequality of capitalist class rule. Nor is this so strange as it might seem: tsarism had only gotten away by the skin of its teeth. And successful revolutions, just because they are so deeply rooted in the needs of
society, tend to cast their shadow before them. Thus that severe archetype of French revolutionary art, David's Oath of the Horatii with its celebration of stoic bourgeois civic morality, was painted in 1784-85, a period in which a whole crop of masterpieces in fact appeared.
New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer commented on the Guggenheim show (New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1981):
"In Popova's oeuve, as in that of many other members of the Russian avant-garde, we first encounter a Cubist vocabulary that looks more or less familiar But then
something happens. A vision—mystical or political or, as was more often the case, some combination of the two—intervenes to alter the inherited vocabulary and set it on a new course, and we are suddenly confronted with forms, textures, ideas that owe little or nothing to the styles that set them on their way."
Unlike the anti-communist Kramer, whose puzzlement results from ideological blinders, we Trotskyists know what the "something" was that seemingly just "happened." It was the October Revolution. Kramer cannot admit its profoundly liberating effect upon society from top to bottom, because to do so would dispel the assiduously cultivated bourgeois myth that the proletarian triumph of 1917 was a Bolshevik putsch from above. But indeed this cultural explosion affected not just Popova but a host of young artists, all of whom just "happened" to make their creative breakthroughs in the crucial years 1917-18. One must look to the great bourgeois upheavals—the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution—for a parallel to this sort of artistic and societal self-confidence.
The Guggenheim Exhibition
One came away from the powerful Guggenheim exhibit convinced of the viability of modernist "abstract" art. What is it about these paintings that produces so marked an effect? First there is the overwhelming vitality. This was a cultural explosion in the making, with an incredible variety of styles and techniques. Times critic Kramer has difficulty reining in his incredulity in the face of these artists' prescience: "Her" [Olga Rozanova's]untitled abstract painting of a vertical green stripe, dating from 1917, was produced more than 30 years before the American painter Barnett Newman began work on the paintings of a very similar design that won him a place of renown— Ivan Kliun
.vividly anticipated more recent developments—in this case, the kind of Minimal Art...that enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s."
The problems being confronted here are those which non-objectivist painters have faced right up to the present, while the solutions advanced by the Russians are both elegant and convincing. These paintings really work. They convey a sense of life and vitality, the result of a concern for painterly texture and the most subtle color gradations. Virtually all these artists cultivated a bright palette that, along with the sheer elegance of their works, their clarity and subtlety of structure, the sense of artistic problems being met and solved, makes them the tangible conveyors across 60 years of the vigor, hope and optimism of revolutionary Russia.
The large number of women artists in the Guggenheim exhibit is itself a powerful index. Kramer comments:
"The Russian avant-garde was the only art movement of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to those of their male colleagues, a circumstance that appears to owe more to the enlightened attitudes of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia than to any measures initiated by the Soviet regime after the Revolution."
Kramer's liberal banalities beg the question. But the fact remains: the only artistic movement in which women were, in Kramer's words, "unquestionably equal" was associated with the only proletarian revolution in history. In the atmosphere of the triumphant Revolution women, many of whom might have remained Sunday painters, their art an ornament on their role as dutiful mothers, had the confidence to devote themselves wholly to art. For every Natalia Goncharova, well-known before the Revolution, there are a half dozen who were unknown at its outset and who would, without its liberating effect, in all likelihood have remained so.
The Bolsheviks and Art
What the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was basically to provide the material/organizational framework and then leave artists and writers to work out artistic problems on their own. In the face of decades of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this was the standpoint of literally all authoritative Party leaders. Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" thus simply voices the standard attitude:
"Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can lead it only indirectly...."
Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, and thus directly in charge of cultural affairs, held identical views: "Of course the state does not have the intention of imposing revolutionary ideas and tastes upon artists. Such compulsion could result only in fake-revolutionary art, since the prime requisite of genuine art is the honesty/sincerity of the artist" ("Revolution and Art," October 1920).
Lunacharsky sought to prevent the dominance of any one artistic clique, which meant above all in post-1919 Russia combatting the influence of the "Proletkult," led by one-time God-seeker and now arch-workerist Bogdanov. Against the Proletkult insistence that art be immediately relevant and comprehensible to Russia's incredibly backward masses (a movement which fed straight into Stalinist "socialist realism"), Lunacharsky insisted "... we cannot adapt our literature to the low cultural level of the broad masses of peasants or even to that of the workers themselves. This would be a mammoth error." Like Trotsky, he refused to accede to the workerists' obscurantist rejection of all past art as simply "bourgeois' insisting that "new proletarian and socialist art can be built only on the foundation of all our acquisitions from the past." This debate mirrored the crucial battle being waged by Lenin and Trotsky, in war-ravaged and starving Russia, for the need to learn to develop and wield the techniques of advanced capitalist production, as against the primitive and Utopian sloganeering of groups like the "Workers Opposition."
Of course, for many members of the Russian avant-garde, such was the attractive power of the Bolshevik-led transformation of society that pure art was not enough. Many became Agitprop artists, creators of revolutionary posters and decorators of the brightly-painted propaganda trains that brought the message of liberation to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union. Essentially these artists' task was political propaganda, attempting first of all to raise the political, and not primarily the artistic, consciousness of their viewers. Another group of artists, at the Institute of Artistic Culture founded by Kandinsky sought to create an overall environment in which the most everyday objects (the ubiquitous Russian tea service, textiles, chairs, clothing, Popova's elegant designs for cigar and cigarette cases) would have worked along with a new architecture and constructivist theater to educate and raise the taste and perceptiveness of Russia's culturally deprived masses. The intention was not a debased "proletarian" art a la Proletkult, but to create the conditions for a classless art, as the workers overcame their decades of material and cultural want, and the achievement of plenty allowed the attainment of socialism.Still many avant-garde artists in post-Revolution
Russia eschewed any effort at direct political relevance. In the scant decade from the October Revolution to the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the late '20s, many Russian artists felt themselves, for the only time in their history, free to devote themselves to art pure and simple, without the imperative need to voice an overt social message. Yet in the manner that great art captures the social matrix from which it springs/ the works of these artists are imbued with optimism and are animated by the hopes of an entire society.
Stalinist Degeneration
What happened instead was the bitter disappointment of those hopes: Stalinist degeneration, the result of the conjuncture of Russian backwardness with the devastation first of World War I and then the civil war, plus—critically—the failure to extend the revolution to advanced Europe, as in Germany in 1923. The work of the avant-garde artists began to disappear from public view, just as the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin disappeared from view. The artists were fortunate even to survive.
That supreme genius of abstraction, Kasimir Malevich, was reduced in the '30s to painting sacchar¬ine landscapes and insipid portraits of smiling village maidens. One can imagine the despair and self-loathing with which this artist must have had to contend. Such surviving members of the Russian avant-garde as Costakis was able to meet in the late '40s and '50s were then either bitter or demoralized. This is not the least of the crimes of the Stalinists: the deliberate destruction of a whole generation of outstanding painters and writers, the transformation of "socialist" (as in "socialist realism") into a term of opprobrium among artists. Under tsarism Russian art and literature had suffered profoundly from the compulsion to make social, not artistic, concerns central. Today, in the deformed and degenerated workers states under the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste, any work of art or literature that does not confront this central problem—the need to oust the usurping bureaucracy— is felt to be inherently mendacious. It lies by omission, the artist knows this, and it shows in his work. For literature this has meant that virtually the sole genre open to serious Soviet writers is satire, for which the opportunities certainly are legion. But even here the works, with a few exceptions like Voinovich, tend to be heavy-handed and obvious, like Aleksandr Zinoviev's aptly named The Yawning Heights. They too are massively deformed, presenting a black-and-white view of society profoundly at odds with the multivalent complexity of great art: socialist realism with the plus and minus signs reversed.
Polish film director Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, currently being shown in the U.S., is a striking case in point. As a piece of hack propaganda for the clerical-reactionary Solidarnos'c', Man of Iron necessarily lies at its heart. It falsely portrays the movement which led to Solidarnos': as the continuation of previous working-class struggles against the Stalinist regime and celebrates the marriage of the workers and intellectuals as presided over by the Catholic church. Unlike the talented director's Man of Marble, a serious work of art probing the contradictions of post-war Polish society, Man of Iron expresses simply the anti-Communist lies of Solidarnos"— and not surprisingly, this has also severely hurt Wajda's art. As we said in Workers Vanguard: "Wajda rejected what Stalinism has done to truth and art, but Man of Iron embraces the lies of anti-Communism and of the church. Of Polish youth, he has said, 'People who are 20 today need to know, and to understand, why their parents are lying.' That is so. They also need to know why one of their leading artists cannot tell the truth" ("Man of Iron: The Gospel According to Solidarnos's"," WV No. 297, 22 January).
The Struggle for Socialism
It is essential to understand that something precious remains of the social gains, the great inspiring goals, which made the explosive, if brief, flowering of art in the Soviet Union possible. Despite its Stalinist degeneration and the line drawn in blood of revolutionaries and workers that separates it from the Soviet Union of Lenin, the USSR today still rests on the foundations of socialized property established by the working class when it took state power. That these foundations are in every sphere massively undermined by the Stalinist usurpers only heightens the urgency of the international working class taking up the defense and extension of this historic victory. To truly defend the socialized property forms of the USSR, and to drive the liberating force of authentic communism forward, it, is necessary to forge an international vanguard party of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism worldwide through socialist revolution and oust the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states through political revolution.
It is of course impossible to say what forms art would take in a genuinely socialist society, one freed of bureaucratic misrule and building on the foundations of technological plenty, not the generalized want of Russia in the '20s—and not in a few countries surrounded by hostile imperialism, but in a world socialist order. Nonetheless it seems safe to predict that whatever its form, the art of a triumphant socialism will partake of the radiance and optimism so triumphantly captured by the Russian avant-garde in the short time granted it."
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Russian Avant-Garde:
Art and the Bolshevik Revolution
by Vladimir Zelinski
Two recent American exhibitions—"The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930—New Perspectives" 1980 national tour, and this winter's Guggenheim Museum show in New York City, part of the George Costakis collection—reveal an incredibly vital and heterogeneous movement. In the period from roughly 1916-17 to 1924, the paintings, constructions and industrial designs of a host of talented artists placed Russian art, before (and thereafter) a derivative and provincial backwater, at the leading edge of 20th century creativity in the arts. The whole Bauhaus school, in particular, is incomprehensible without the influence of the Russian Constructivists and "production artists," transmitted by such figures as Kandinsky and El Lissitzky.
This movement was largely ignored in the West for almost half a century until its first major Western exhibit in London in 1971. Today such exhibits are promoted and armed with a mendacious anti-Communist "message": the bourgeois media disappear the social relation of this art to the October Revolution and pretend that it was repressed in revolutionary Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. In fact the avant-garde was literally disappeared—but only under triumphant Stalinism. During the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, the revolutionary artists were transformed into non-persons and then plucked from obscurity and subjected to frenzied attacks on their supposed degenerate "bourgeois formalism" by Stalin's culture boss Zhdanov.
The reason is simple: though art is not "political" in a direct sense, this art in its own way is political dynamite. It gives the lie to the equation of Leninism with Stalinism, connived at by capitalist ideologues and Stalinist hacks alike ever since the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was smashed. Time has not defused the political impact of these fine works. Their exhibition in the USSR today would reveal the stunning mediocrity of "official art" (as well as the sorry state of "dissident" and "non-conformist" artistic production). It would also inevitably raise deeply embarrassing and (for the usurping bureaucrats) unanswerable questions. What happened to these artists? Why was genuinely great art possible in Russia in the early '20s, in the midst of incredible backwardness and massive poverty, but not now, under conditions of relative material plenty and technological progress?
Art and Society
Since bourgeois patrons were obviously lacking, clearly the government and cultural institutions of the infant Soviet workers state had to play a central role in supporting this art, an art whose abstractness and aura of airiness and radiant optimism place it at far remove from the dogmas and products of Stalinist "socialist realism."
Russian " revolutionary" art did not, of course, spring from the head of Lenin. The bourgeois media would like to suggest that there is little if any relationship between the Bolsheviks' successful October Revolution and the cultural explosion of 1917-25. But there are in fact numerous ties, going back all the way to the 1850s artistic revolt against the hitherto dominant neo¬classical tradition. This is not to say that Russian painters and writers were necessarily Marxist. Rather they inevitably mirrored the travail of a society groaning beneath the yoke of a tsarist autocracy incapable of effecting Russia's passage into the mainstream of bourgeois economic, political and cultural development.
The author of the main work leading to the founding of the Russian realist school, The Aesthetic Relation of An to Reality, was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, better known among revolutionaries for his seminal novel What Is To Be Done?, which so profoundly moved and influenced a generation of Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Chernyshevsky's belief that it was necessary to forestall "the accusation that art is an empty diversion" through imbuing it with social content was characteristic of the radical intelligentsia.
Thus the "Wanderers" grouping of artists founded under Chernyshevsky's influence in 1870grew along lines strikingly similar to those of overtly political groupings. Many of its members, like the Populists, "went to the people" and elevated the Russian peasant, mired in his immemorial priest-ridden backwardness, as hero of the new art. Wealthy Slavophile merchants supported artistic colonies (Abramtsevo and Talashkino) whose residents sought inspiration in a William Morris-ish arts-and-craftsy revival of moribund Byzantine tradition or the primitive folk art of lubok (chapbook) woodcuts.
Around the turn of the century a symbolist school arose influenced by the fin-du-siecle "decadents" of the West. Although reflecting the increasing cultural sophistication of their patrons, such artists as Viktor Borrisov-Mussatov succeeded only in producing yet paler copies of the already effete Puvis de Chavannes, elegiac paintings of abandoned country mansions and empty-gazed demoiselles—works which with hindsight one is tempted to assert expressed (like much of Chekhov) the consciousness of a merchant/ landholding gentry lacking an historic future. And art-for-art's-sake withdrawal from social concerns also arose, partly reflecting Russian artists' sense of futility at the intelligentsia's failure to transform society by literary means.
This "World of Art," centered around the multi-talented Aleksandr Benois, nonetheless laid the foundations for future developments, mounting a series of exhibitions that introduced contemporary European art to Russian painters and young Russian artists to a wider public.
The Great Experiment
The first expressions of the coming breakthrough appeared between 1905-1917, with the rise of a gifted and innovative younger generation of painters. Their openness to experimentation, derived partly from the German expressionists and French cubists, arose also from the sudden sense of release generated even in defeat by the great proletarian upsurge of the 1905 Revolution. (See "Before 'Socialist Realism' in the Soviet Union," W&R No. 13, Winter 1976-77, for a discussion of this burst of creativity in other artistic areas, notably dance and theater.)
This feeling that the whole anachronistic edifice of tsarism was crumbling inspired in these artists a will to radically reshape art and its relation to society. Seeking through scientific inquiry into the interaction of planes, volumes, color, overall structuring of the canvas and their effects on the viewer to discover laws inherent to art, they rejected the naturalistic tradition (in which even cubism remained based). This was the program that, despite factional differences, united the Russian avant-garde right down to their repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence the rationalism of this art, its tendency toward a radical geometricizing simplification.
The art of the Russian avant-garde thus to an extent anticipated the revolution to whose ideals it lent expression: a fundamental faith in man's capacity to rationally reshape society, doing away with the material and intellectual compulsion springing from the anarchy and inequality of capitalist class rule. Nor is this so strange as it might seem: tsarism had only gotten away by the skin of its teeth. And successful revolutions, just because they are so deeply rooted in the needs of
society, tend to cast their shadow before them. Thus that severe archetype of French revolutionary art, David's Oath of the Horatii with its celebration of stoic bourgeois civic morality, was painted in 1784-85, a period in which a whole crop of masterpieces in fact appeared.
New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer commented on the Guggenheim show (New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1981):
"In Popova's oeuve, as in that of many other members of the Russian avant-garde, we first encounter a Cubist vocabulary that looks more or less familiar But then
something happens. A vision—mystical or political or, as was more often the case, some combination of the two—intervenes to alter the inherited vocabulary and set it on a new course, and we are suddenly confronted with forms, textures, ideas that owe little or nothing to the styles that set them on their way."
Unlike the anti-communist Kramer, whose puzzlement results from ideological blinders, we Trotskyists know what the "something" was that seemingly just "happened." It was the October Revolution. Kramer cannot admit its profoundly liberating effect upon society from top to bottom, because to do so would dispel the assiduously cultivated bourgeois myth that the proletarian triumph of 1917 was a Bolshevik putsch from above. But indeed this cultural explosion affected not just Popova but a host of young artists, all of whom just "happened" to make their creative breakthroughs in the crucial years 1917-18. One must look to the great bourgeois upheavals—the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution—for a parallel to this sort of artistic and societal self-confidence.
The Guggenheim Exhibition
One came away from the powerful Guggenheim exhibit convinced of the viability of modernist "abstract" art. What is it about these paintings that produces so marked an effect? First there is the overwhelming vitality. This was a cultural explosion in the making, with an incredible variety of styles and techniques. Times critic Kramer has difficulty reining in his incredulity in the face of these artists' prescience: "Her" [Olga Rozanova's]untitled abstract painting of a vertical green stripe, dating from 1917, was produced more than 30 years before the American painter Barnett Newman began work on the paintings of a very similar design that won him a place of renown— Ivan Kliun
.vividly anticipated more recent developments—in this case, the kind of Minimal Art...that enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s."
The problems being confronted here are those which non-objectivist painters have faced right up to the present, while the solutions advanced by the Russians are both elegant and convincing. These paintings really work. They convey a sense of life and vitality, the result of a concern for painterly texture and the most subtle color gradations. Virtually all these artists cultivated a bright palette that, along with the sheer elegance of their works, their clarity and subtlety of structure, the sense of artistic problems being met and solved, makes them the tangible conveyors across 60 years of the vigor, hope and optimism of revolutionary Russia.
The large number of women artists in the Guggenheim exhibit is itself a powerful index. Kramer comments:
"The Russian avant-garde was the only art movement of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to those of their male colleagues, a circumstance that appears to owe more to the enlightened attitudes of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia than to any measures initiated by the Soviet regime after the Revolution."
Kramer's liberal banalities beg the question. But the fact remains: the only artistic movement in which women were, in Kramer's words, "unquestionably equal" was associated with the only proletarian revolution in history. In the atmosphere of the triumphant Revolution women, many of whom might have remained Sunday painters, their art an ornament on their role as dutiful mothers, had the confidence to devote themselves wholly to art. For every Natalia Goncharova, well-known before the Revolution, there are a half dozen who were unknown at its outset and who would, without its liberating effect, in all likelihood have remained so.
The Bolsheviks and Art
What the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was basically to provide the material/organizational framework and then leave artists and writers to work out artistic problems on their own. In the face of decades of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this was the standpoint of literally all authoritative Party leaders. Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" thus simply voices the standard attitude:
"Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can lead it only indirectly...."
Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, and thus directly in charge of cultural affairs, held identical views: "Of course the state does not have the intention of imposing revolutionary ideas and tastes upon artists. Such compulsion could result only in fake-revolutionary art, since the prime requisite of genuine art is the honesty/sincerity of the artist" ("Revolution and Art," October 1920).
Lunacharsky sought to prevent the dominance of any one artistic clique, which meant above all in post-1919 Russia combatting the influence of the "Proletkult," led by one-time God-seeker and now arch-workerist Bogdanov. Against the Proletkult insistence that art be immediately relevant and comprehensible to Russia's incredibly backward masses (a movement which fed straight into Stalinist "socialist realism"), Lunacharsky insisted "... we cannot adapt our literature to the low cultural level of the broad masses of peasants or even to that of the workers themselves. This would be a mammoth error." Like Trotsky, he refused to accede to the workerists' obscurantist rejection of all past art as simply "bourgeois' insisting that "new proletarian and socialist art can be built only on the foundation of all our acquisitions from the past." This debate mirrored the crucial battle being waged by Lenin and Trotsky, in war-ravaged and starving Russia, for the need to learn to develop and wield the techniques of advanced capitalist production, as against the primitive and Utopian sloganeering of groups like the "Workers Opposition."
Of course, for many members of the Russian avant-garde, such was the attractive power of the Bolshevik-led transformation of society that pure art was not enough. Many became Agitprop artists, creators of revolutionary posters and decorators of the brightly-painted propaganda trains that brought the message of liberation to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union. Essentially these artists' task was political propaganda, attempting first of all to raise the political, and not primarily the artistic, consciousness of their viewers. Another group of artists, at the Institute of Artistic Culture founded by Kandinsky sought to create an overall environment in which the most everyday objects (the ubiquitous Russian tea service, textiles, chairs, clothing, Popova's elegant designs for cigar and cigarette cases) would have worked along with a new architecture and constructivist theater to educate and raise the taste and perceptiveness of Russia's culturally deprived masses. The intention was not a debased "proletarian" art a la Proletkult, but to create the conditions for a classless art, as the workers overcame their decades of material and cultural want, and the achievement of plenty allowed the attainment of socialism.Still many avant-garde artists in post-Revolution
Russia eschewed any effort at direct political relevance. In the scant decade from the October Revolution to the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the late '20s, many Russian artists felt themselves, for the only time in their history, free to devote themselves to art pure and simple, without the imperative need to voice an overt social message. Yet in the manner that great art captures the social matrix from which it springs/ the works of these artists are imbued with optimism and are animated by the hopes of an entire society.
Stalinist Degeneration
What happened instead was the bitter disappointment of those hopes: Stalinist degeneration, the result of the conjuncture of Russian backwardness with the devastation first of World War I and then the civil war, plus—critically—the failure to extend the revolution to advanced Europe, as in Germany in 1923. The work of the avant-garde artists began to disappear from public view, just as the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin disappeared from view. The artists were fortunate even to survive.
That supreme genius of abstraction, Kasimir Malevich, was reduced in the '30s to painting sacchar¬ine landscapes and insipid portraits of smiling village maidens. One can imagine the despair and self-loathing with which this artist must have had to contend. Such surviving members of the Russian avant-garde as Costakis was able to meet in the late '40s and '50s were then either bitter or demoralized. This is not the least of the crimes of the Stalinists: the deliberate destruction of a whole generation of outstanding painters and writers, the transformation of "socialist" (as in "socialist realism") into a term of opprobrium among artists. Under tsarism Russian art and literature had suffered profoundly from the compulsion to make social, not artistic, concerns central. Today, in the deformed and degenerated workers states under the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste, any work of art or literature that does not confront this central problem—the need to oust the usurping bureaucracy— is felt to be inherently mendacious. It lies by omission, the artist knows this, and it shows in his work. For literature this has meant that virtually the sole genre open to serious Soviet writers is satire, for which the opportunities certainly are legion. But even here the works, with a few exceptions like Voinovich, tend to be heavy-handed and obvious, like Aleksandr Zinoviev's aptly named The Yawning Heights. They too are massively deformed, presenting a black-and-white view of society profoundly at odds with the multivalent complexity of great art: socialist realism with the plus and minus signs reversed.
Polish film director Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, currently being shown in the U.S., is a striking case in point. As a piece of hack propaganda for the clerical-reactionary Solidarnos'c', Man of Iron necessarily lies at its heart. It falsely portrays the movement which led to Solidarnos': as the continuation of previous working-class struggles against the Stalinist regime and celebrates the marriage of the workers and intellectuals as presided over by the Catholic church. Unlike the talented director's Man of Marble, a serious work of art probing the contradictions of post-war Polish society, Man of Iron expresses simply the anti-Communist lies of Solidarnos"— and not surprisingly, this has also severely hurt Wajda's art. As we said in Workers Vanguard: "Wajda rejected what Stalinism has done to truth and art, but Man of Iron embraces the lies of anti-Communism and of the church. Of Polish youth, he has said, 'People who are 20 today need to know, and to understand, why their parents are lying.' That is so. They also need to know why one of their leading artists cannot tell the truth" ("Man of Iron: The Gospel According to Solidarnos's"," WV No. 297, 22 January).
The Struggle for Socialism
It is essential to understand that something precious remains of the social gains, the great inspiring goals, which made the explosive, if brief, flowering of art in the Soviet Union possible. Despite its Stalinist degeneration and the line drawn in blood of revolutionaries and workers that separates it from the Soviet Union of Lenin, the USSR today still rests on the foundations of socialized property established by the working class when it took state power. That these foundations are in every sphere massively undermined by the Stalinist usurpers only heightens the urgency of the international working class taking up the defense and extension of this historic victory. To truly defend the socialized property forms of the USSR, and to drive the liberating force of authentic communism forward, it, is necessary to forge an international vanguard party of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism worldwide through socialist revolution and oust the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states through political revolution.
It is of course impossible to say what forms art would take in a genuinely socialist society, one freed of bureaucratic misrule and building on the foundations of technological plenty, not the generalized want of Russia in the '20s—and not in a few countries surrounded by hostile imperialism, but in a world socialist order. Nonetheless it seems safe to predict that whatever its form, the art of a triumphant socialism will partake of the radiance and optimism so triumphantly captured by the Russian avant-garde in the short time granted it."
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- Old Left "Culture Wars"-Lillian Hellman vs.Mary McCarthy-Ouch!
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Lillian Hellman.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1980-81 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy:
What Becomes a Legend Most?
Two such literary legends as Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy squabbling over who's a liar and who's a slanderer, with over a million bucks at stake, certainly isn't very becoming. But these really aren't two bitter old ladies locked in senile death-battle over whose cat killed the canary. Although New York intelligentsia clique fights are often best left to Woody Allen ("I hear Dissent and Commentary are fusing—they're calling it Dysentery," he said in Annie Hall), this case did provoke a few thoughts.
Two self-serving myths of American liberalism are in collision here, with roots going back to the '30s when so many literati had heady affairs with communism. The current fracas was kicked off by Mary McCarthy's caustic comment on the Dick Cavett show last January that "Lillian Hellman...is terribly overrated, a bad writer and dishonest writer... every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." So liberal darling/ feminist heroine Hellman, author of Scoundrel Time and the memoir which became the popular movie Julia, promptly sued McCarthy et al. for $1.7 million, claiming "mental anguish" and "injury in her profession."
But it isn't really the money, or literary reputation, that Hellman and McCarthy are fighting over—the real question is whose legend will prevail. Hellman's defenders cite her defense of "simple decency" before the infamous 1952 HUAC trials. Many of McCarthy's partisans, on the other hand, recall her image as a righteously indignant seeker-for-truth, attacking Stal¬in's brutal repression and exposing the cheery "men of good will" Popular Front lies fellow travelers like Hellman spouted. Of course it is to Hellman's credit that she refused to fink to HUAC—unlike Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets and so many others—and to McCarthy's that she recognized the Moscow Trials for the vicious frame-up they were. Yet the truth is rather more complicated, and even though a lot of blood's flowed under the bridge since the '30s and '40s, it's obvious the old wars haven't been forgotten (and why not; after all, for many their brush with communism was the most vivid, important part of their lives). As we pointed out in a Workers Vanguard (18 June 1976) review of Scoundrel Time: "Hellman's memoir...confirms the general warning appropriate to the confessional genre: look out for what is omitted— although [Hellman] explains her stand before HUAC by 'these simple rules of human decency,' life was not so simple, she was not so simple, and it was all political."
Hellman was a well-known Stalinist fellow traveler, as McCarthy remembers full well. Hellman joined the Stalinists in cheering on their bloody Popular Front policies in the Spanish Civil War, while McCarthy supported the POUMists being butchered on Stalin's orders. Hellman's "simple decency" didn't extend to the victims of the 1936 Moscow Trials frame-up, nor to the Trotskyist leaders sent to prison in 1943 under the U.S. Smith Act, nor to artists like the Russian composer Shostakovich, muzzled and harassed by the bureaucra¬cy while she burbled on about the progressive culture of the USSR. No wonder McCarthy today still can't stand Hellman, wrapped up in her Blackglama mink and utterly snobbish self-congratulations as just another well-bred white Southern lady steeped in "old-fashioned American traditions."
Of course Mary McCarthy did her bit for the Cold War, abandoning her earlier Trotskyist sympathies. During the '50s she opposed the anti-Communist witchhunts only because they gave real anti-Communism a bad name with their "red-neck anti-intellectual boorish methods," and attacked "the Communist's concealment of his ideas and motives" in a speech to the notoriously Cold War, anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Still, to her credit McCarthy did break with the Cold War crowd relatively early during the Vietnam War, and wrote a good book exposing U.S. imperialism's crimes in Vietnam—and attacking those '50s organizations she had addressed. Polemicizing against Diana Trilling in her book Hanoi, McCarthy wrote:
"I reject Mrs. Trilling's call to order.... And if as a result of my ill-considered actions, world Communism comes to power, it will be too late then, I shall be told to be sorry. Never mind. Some sort of life will continue, as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavski, Daniel have discovered, and I would rather be on their letterhead, if they will allow me, than on that of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which in its days of glory, as Mrs. Trilling will recall, was eager to exercise its right of protest on such initiatives as the issue of a U.S. visa to Graham Greene and was actually divided within its ranks on the question of whether Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend or enemy of domestic liberty."
It's too bad Hellman and McCarthy have chosen to battle it out on the rather obscure terrain of purely personal "morality," since both know where plenty of bodies are buried. But they seem to have settled for enshrinement in a panoply of petty-bourgeois legends of liberalism. As Trotskyists we have long pointed out that such legendary "personal morality" does not stand outside class politics. This case proves it doesn't even stand above vicious squabbles over money. Nor can we help noting that Hellman hasn't forgotten at least one of the grand old Stalinist traditions—she's still seeking revenge against her enemies through the capitalist state.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1980-81 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy:
What Becomes a Legend Most?
Two such literary legends as Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy squabbling over who's a liar and who's a slanderer, with over a million bucks at stake, certainly isn't very becoming. But these really aren't two bitter old ladies locked in senile death-battle over whose cat killed the canary. Although New York intelligentsia clique fights are often best left to Woody Allen ("I hear Dissent and Commentary are fusing—they're calling it Dysentery," he said in Annie Hall), this case did provoke a few thoughts.
Two self-serving myths of American liberalism are in collision here, with roots going back to the '30s when so many literati had heady affairs with communism. The current fracas was kicked off by Mary McCarthy's caustic comment on the Dick Cavett show last January that "Lillian Hellman...is terribly overrated, a bad writer and dishonest writer... every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." So liberal darling/ feminist heroine Hellman, author of Scoundrel Time and the memoir which became the popular movie Julia, promptly sued McCarthy et al. for $1.7 million, claiming "mental anguish" and "injury in her profession."
But it isn't really the money, or literary reputation, that Hellman and McCarthy are fighting over—the real question is whose legend will prevail. Hellman's defenders cite her defense of "simple decency" before the infamous 1952 HUAC trials. Many of McCarthy's partisans, on the other hand, recall her image as a righteously indignant seeker-for-truth, attacking Stal¬in's brutal repression and exposing the cheery "men of good will" Popular Front lies fellow travelers like Hellman spouted. Of course it is to Hellman's credit that she refused to fink to HUAC—unlike Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets and so many others—and to McCarthy's that she recognized the Moscow Trials for the vicious frame-up they were. Yet the truth is rather more complicated, and even though a lot of blood's flowed under the bridge since the '30s and '40s, it's obvious the old wars haven't been forgotten (and why not; after all, for many their brush with communism was the most vivid, important part of their lives). As we pointed out in a Workers Vanguard (18 June 1976) review of Scoundrel Time: "Hellman's memoir...confirms the general warning appropriate to the confessional genre: look out for what is omitted— although [Hellman] explains her stand before HUAC by 'these simple rules of human decency,' life was not so simple, she was not so simple, and it was all political."
Hellman was a well-known Stalinist fellow traveler, as McCarthy remembers full well. Hellman joined the Stalinists in cheering on their bloody Popular Front policies in the Spanish Civil War, while McCarthy supported the POUMists being butchered on Stalin's orders. Hellman's "simple decency" didn't extend to the victims of the 1936 Moscow Trials frame-up, nor to the Trotskyist leaders sent to prison in 1943 under the U.S. Smith Act, nor to artists like the Russian composer Shostakovich, muzzled and harassed by the bureaucra¬cy while she burbled on about the progressive culture of the USSR. No wonder McCarthy today still can't stand Hellman, wrapped up in her Blackglama mink and utterly snobbish self-congratulations as just another well-bred white Southern lady steeped in "old-fashioned American traditions."
Of course Mary McCarthy did her bit for the Cold War, abandoning her earlier Trotskyist sympathies. During the '50s she opposed the anti-Communist witchhunts only because they gave real anti-Communism a bad name with their "red-neck anti-intellectual boorish methods," and attacked "the Communist's concealment of his ideas and motives" in a speech to the notoriously Cold War, anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Still, to her credit McCarthy did break with the Cold War crowd relatively early during the Vietnam War, and wrote a good book exposing U.S. imperialism's crimes in Vietnam—and attacking those '50s organizations she had addressed. Polemicizing against Diana Trilling in her book Hanoi, McCarthy wrote:
"I reject Mrs. Trilling's call to order.... And if as a result of my ill-considered actions, world Communism comes to power, it will be too late then, I shall be told to be sorry. Never mind. Some sort of life will continue, as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavski, Daniel have discovered, and I would rather be on their letterhead, if they will allow me, than on that of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which in its days of glory, as Mrs. Trilling will recall, was eager to exercise its right of protest on such initiatives as the issue of a U.S. visa to Graham Greene and was actually divided within its ranks on the question of whether Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend or enemy of domestic liberty."
It's too bad Hellman and McCarthy have chosen to battle it out on the rather obscure terrain of purely personal "morality," since both know where plenty of bodies are buried. But they seem to have settled for enshrinement in a panoply of petty-bourgeois legends of liberalism. As Trotskyists we have long pointed out that such legendary "personal morality" does not stand outside class politics. This case proves it doesn't even stand above vicious squabbles over money. Nor can we help noting that Hellman hasn't forgotten at least one of the grand old Stalinist traditions—she's still seeking revenge against her enemies through the capitalist state.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
*From "The American Insurgency" Blog- Widom (Oops!) For The Ages
Click on the headline to link to an "American Insurgency" blog entry on the travails of Teabagger 'education'.
Markin comment:
I agree with "American Insurgency" on that troublesome problem of fighting with the quirks of the "spell check". Oh, yes, and on the Teabagger problem as well. Nice job.
Markin comment:
I agree with "American Insurgency" on that troublesome problem of fighting with the quirks of the "spell check". Oh, yes, and on the Teabagger problem as well. Nice job.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
*From "The Rag Blog"- "A Luddite's Prayer To Gaia" -Notes On the Imperial Star Fleet
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry concerning the current (and future)of the American imperial star fleet.
Markin comment:
Nobody can say I do not have a bent for the quirky after I have posted this one. Believe me there is more than a little Luddite in me (and every self-styled Bolshevik).
Markin comment:
Nobody can say I do not have a bent for the quirky after I have posted this one. Believe me there is more than a little Luddite in me (and every self-styled Bolshevik).
Sunday, February 21, 2010
*Poet's Corner- The Work Of French Poet Arthur Rimbaud
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Markin comment:
One cannot have paid serious attention to American storyteller/songwriter/poet Bob Dylan's early work, especially "Desolation Row" and "Like Tom Thumbs Blues" without have coming into contact with, and note the influnce of, the two 19th century French poets honored today, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. And the selections below certainly make the case for that statement.
Ophelia
I
On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils...
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.
For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.
The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.
The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.
II
O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.
It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;
It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft;
It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman
Who one April morning sate mute at your knees!
Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl!
You melted to him as snow does to a fire;
Your great visions strangled your words
- And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye!
III
- And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.
Arthur Rimbaud
Dance Of The Hanged Men
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
Sir Beelzebub pulls by the scruff
His little black puppets who grin at the sky,
And with a backhander in the head like a kick,
Makes them dance, dance, to an old Carol-tune!
And the puppets, shaken about, entwine their thin arms:
Their breasts pierced with light, like black organ-pipes
Which once gentle ladies pressed to their own,
Jostle together protractedly in hideous love-making.
Hurray! the gay dancers, you whose bellies are gone!
You can cut capers on such a long stage!
Hop! never mind whether it's fighting or dancing!
- Beelzebub, maddened, saws on his fiddles!
Oh the hard heels, no one's pumps are wearing out!
And nearly all have taken of their shirts of skin;
The rest is not embarrassing and can be seen without shame.
On each skull the snow places a white hat:
The crow acts as a plume for these cracked brains,
A scrap of flesh clings to each lean chin:
You would say, to see them turning in their dark combats,
They were stiff knights clashing pasteboard armours.
Hurrah! the wind whistles at the skeletons' grand ball!
The black gallows moans like an organ of iron !
The wolves howl back from the violet forests:
And on the horizon the sky is hell-red...
Ho there, shake up those funereal braggarts,
Craftily telling with their great broken fingers
The beads of their loves on their pale vertebrae:
Hey the departed, this is no monastery here!
Oh! but see how from the middle of this Dance of Death
Springs into the red sky a great skeleton, mad,
Carried away by his own impetus, like a rearing horse:
And, feeling the rope tight again round his neck,
Clenches his knuckles on his thighbone with a crack
Uttering cries like mocking laughter,
And then like a mountebank into his booth,
Skips back into the dance to the music of the bones!
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
My Bohemian Life
I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets;
My overcoat too was becoming ideal;
I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh dear me! what marvellous loves I dreamed of!
My only pair of breeches had a big whole in them.
– Stargazing Tom Thumb, I sowed rhymes along my way.
My tavern was at the Sign of the Great Bear.
– My stars in the sky rustled softly.
And I listened to them, sitting on the road-sides
On those pleasant September evenings while I felt drops
Of dew on my forehead like vigorous wine;
And while, rhyming among the fantastical shadows,
I plucked like the strings of a lyre the elastics
Of my tattered boots, one foot close to my heart!
Markin comment:
One cannot have paid serious attention to American storyteller/songwriter/poet Bob Dylan's early work, especially "Desolation Row" and "Like Tom Thumbs Blues" without have coming into contact with, and note the influnce of, the two 19th century French poets honored today, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. And the selections below certainly make the case for that statement.
Ophelia
I
On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils...
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.
For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.
The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.
The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.
II
O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.
It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;
It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft;
It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman
Who one April morning sate mute at your knees!
Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl!
You melted to him as snow does to a fire;
Your great visions strangled your words
- And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye!
III
- And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.
Arthur Rimbaud
Dance Of The Hanged Men
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
Sir Beelzebub pulls by the scruff
His little black puppets who grin at the sky,
And with a backhander in the head like a kick,
Makes them dance, dance, to an old Carol-tune!
And the puppets, shaken about, entwine their thin arms:
Their breasts pierced with light, like black organ-pipes
Which once gentle ladies pressed to their own,
Jostle together protractedly in hideous love-making.
Hurray! the gay dancers, you whose bellies are gone!
You can cut capers on such a long stage!
Hop! never mind whether it's fighting or dancing!
- Beelzebub, maddened, saws on his fiddles!
Oh the hard heels, no one's pumps are wearing out!
And nearly all have taken of their shirts of skin;
The rest is not embarrassing and can be seen without shame.
On each skull the snow places a white hat:
The crow acts as a plume for these cracked brains,
A scrap of flesh clings to each lean chin:
You would say, to see them turning in their dark combats,
They were stiff knights clashing pasteboard armours.
Hurrah! the wind whistles at the skeletons' grand ball!
The black gallows moans like an organ of iron !
The wolves howl back from the violet forests:
And on the horizon the sky is hell-red...
Ho there, shake up those funereal braggarts,
Craftily telling with their great broken fingers
The beads of their loves on their pale vertebrae:
Hey the departed, this is no monastery here!
Oh! but see how from the middle of this Dance of Death
Springs into the red sky a great skeleton, mad,
Carried away by his own impetus, like a rearing horse:
And, feeling the rope tight again round his neck,
Clenches his knuckles on his thighbone with a crack
Uttering cries like mocking laughter,
And then like a mountebank into his booth,
Skips back into the dance to the music of the bones!
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil's paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.
My Bohemian Life
I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets;
My overcoat too was becoming ideal;
I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh dear me! what marvellous loves I dreamed of!
My only pair of breeches had a big whole in them.
– Stargazing Tom Thumb, I sowed rhymes along my way.
My tavern was at the Sign of the Great Bear.
– My stars in the sky rustled softly.
And I listened to them, sitting on the road-sides
On those pleasant September evenings while I felt drops
Of dew on my forehead like vigorous wine;
And while, rhyming among the fantastical shadows,
I plucked like the strings of a lyre the elastics
Of my tattered boots, one foot close to my heart!
Friday, February 19, 2010
*From The Depths Of Memory- A Personal Note On Youthful Romance
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Vladimir Mayakovsky, the great Russian poet who is mentioned in the entry below.
Markin comment:
Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?
Trotsky once noted, as his most famous biographer Issac Deutscher related, and which is most prominently addressed by him in the last chapter of his seminal work, "Literature and Revolution", that of the three great tragedies of life- hunger, sex, and death-the modern labor movement had taken up the struggle against hunger as its goal. Trotsky also noted that under conditions of material abundance in a future communist society that the other two questions would be dealt with in a much more rational manner. Well, as this tale of my youth's thwarted 'passions' demonstrates it cannot come soon enough. Resolving the tangled questions of sex and love, moreover, will be a lot more interesting that the infernal struggle against international capitalism, racism, sexism, and the myriad other social ills that we are duty-bound to fight today. That too is worth the fight.
*******
For Margaret G. - In Lieu Of A Letter
I make no claim to any literary originality. I will shamelessly ‘steal’ any idea, or half-idea that catches my fancy in order to make my point. That is the case today, as I go back in time to my elementary school days down at the old school in the X housing project. Part of the title for today’s entry and the central idea that I want to express is taken from a poem by the great Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky.
So what do a poet who died in 1930 and a moonstruck kid from the 'projects', growing up haphazardly in 1950s America, have in common? We have both been thrown back, unexpectedly, to childhood romantic fantasies of the “girl who got away”. In my case, Margaret G., as the title to this entry indicates. I do not remember what triggered Mayakovsky’s memories but mine have been produced via an indirect school Internet connection. In this instance, damn the Internet. I do not know the fate of Margaret G., although I fervently hope that life has worked out well for her. This I do know. For the time that it will take to write this entry I return to being a smitten, unhappy boy.
Mayakovsky would, of course, now dazzle us with his intoxicating use of language, stirring deep thoughts in us about his unhappy fate. I will plod along prosaically, as is my fate. Through the dust of time, sparked by that Internet prod, I have hazy, dreamy memories of the demure Margaret G., mainly as seemed from afar through furtive glances in the old schoolyard at the elementary school(which is today in very much the same condition as back then) . This is a very appealing memory, to be sure, of a fresh, young girl full of hopes and dreams, and who knows what else.
But a more physical description is in order that befits the ‘real time’ of my young ‘romance’ fantasies. Margaret G. strongly evoked in me a feeling of softness, soft as the cashmere sweaters that she wore and that reflected the schoolgirl fashion of those seemingly sunnier days. And she almost always wore a slight suggestion of a smile, working its way through a full-lipped mouth. And had a voice, just turning away from girlishness to womanhood, which spoke of future conquests. I should also say that her hair… But enough of this. This is now getting all mixed up with adult dreams of childhood. Let the fact of fifty years' remembrances speak to her charms.
Did I ‘love’ Margaret G.? That is a silly thought for a bashful, ill-at-ease, ragamuffin of a project boy and a ‘princess’ who never uttered two words, if that, to each other, ever. Did I ‘want’ Margaret G.? Come on now, that is the stuff of adult dreams. Did Margaret G. disturb my sleep? Well, yes, she was undoubtedly the subject of more than one chaste dream, although perhaps not so innocent at that. But know this. Time may bury many childhood wounds but there are not enough medicines, not enough bandages on this good, green earth to stanch some of them. So let’s just leave it at that. Or rather, as this. For the moment it takes to finish this note I am an unhappy man and… maybe, for longer.
Markin comment:
Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?
Trotsky once noted, as his most famous biographer Issac Deutscher related, and which is most prominently addressed by him in the last chapter of his seminal work, "Literature and Revolution", that of the three great tragedies of life- hunger, sex, and death-the modern labor movement had taken up the struggle against hunger as its goal. Trotsky also noted that under conditions of material abundance in a future communist society that the other two questions would be dealt with in a much more rational manner. Well, as this tale of my youth's thwarted 'passions' demonstrates it cannot come soon enough. Resolving the tangled questions of sex and love, moreover, will be a lot more interesting that the infernal struggle against international capitalism, racism, sexism, and the myriad other social ills that we are duty-bound to fight today. That too is worth the fight.
*******
For Margaret G. - In Lieu Of A Letter
I make no claim to any literary originality. I will shamelessly ‘steal’ any idea, or half-idea that catches my fancy in order to make my point. That is the case today, as I go back in time to my elementary school days down at the old school in the X housing project. Part of the title for today’s entry and the central idea that I want to express is taken from a poem by the great Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky.
So what do a poet who died in 1930 and a moonstruck kid from the 'projects', growing up haphazardly in 1950s America, have in common? We have both been thrown back, unexpectedly, to childhood romantic fantasies of the “girl who got away”. In my case, Margaret G., as the title to this entry indicates. I do not remember what triggered Mayakovsky’s memories but mine have been produced via an indirect school Internet connection. In this instance, damn the Internet. I do not know the fate of Margaret G., although I fervently hope that life has worked out well for her. This I do know. For the time that it will take to write this entry I return to being a smitten, unhappy boy.
Mayakovsky would, of course, now dazzle us with his intoxicating use of language, stirring deep thoughts in us about his unhappy fate. I will plod along prosaically, as is my fate. Through the dust of time, sparked by that Internet prod, I have hazy, dreamy memories of the demure Margaret G., mainly as seemed from afar through furtive glances in the old schoolyard at the elementary school(which is today in very much the same condition as back then) . This is a very appealing memory, to be sure, of a fresh, young girl full of hopes and dreams, and who knows what else.
But a more physical description is in order that befits the ‘real time’ of my young ‘romance’ fantasies. Margaret G. strongly evoked in me a feeling of softness, soft as the cashmere sweaters that she wore and that reflected the schoolgirl fashion of those seemingly sunnier days. And she almost always wore a slight suggestion of a smile, working its way through a full-lipped mouth. And had a voice, just turning away from girlishness to womanhood, which spoke of future conquests. I should also say that her hair… But enough of this. This is now getting all mixed up with adult dreams of childhood. Let the fact of fifty years' remembrances speak to her charms.
Did I ‘love’ Margaret G.? That is a silly thought for a bashful, ill-at-ease, ragamuffin of a project boy and a ‘princess’ who never uttered two words, if that, to each other, ever. Did I ‘want’ Margaret G.? Come on now, that is the stuff of adult dreams. Did Margaret G. disturb my sleep? Well, yes, she was undoubtedly the subject of more than one chaste dream, although perhaps not so innocent at that. But know this. Time may bury many childhood wounds but there are not enough medicines, not enough bandages on this good, green earth to stanch some of them. So let’s just leave it at that. Or rather, as this. For the moment it takes to finish this note I am an unhappy man and… maybe, for longer.
Friday, January 08, 2010
*Writer's Corner- From The Pen Of Dostoevsky- "The Possessed"
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Dostoevsky's novel "The Possessed" that this film under review today, Jean Luc-Godard's " La Chiniose" is based on.
Book Review
The Possessed, Fyodor Dostovesky, Barnes & Noble, New York, 2004
Dostoevsky was a central figure in the great Russian literary revival of the 19th century, spurred on by the clearly foreseen, and necessary coming revolution that was on every radical intellectuals mind. The Russian novel, in a sense, reflected, in one way or another, the propaganda written for that event. This novel, moreover, forms the intellectual backdrop for a review that I have recently done on Jean Luc-Godard's "La Chinoise" from 1967. That film used the story line of the novel as the script for a modern day version of the struggle of a group of young middle class intellectuals driven to despair by the political/cultural/social and existential circumstances of their lives, yet were unable to fight effectively for their vision of the future, mainly due to their devotion to the "circle" spirit and distance from the class struggles of their times.
Thus from different centuries and responding to different sets of circumstances the film and novel come to the same basic conclusion about the futility of struggle against authority, or the fear that the "new order" will be just a rehash of the old led to both director and author to some very unrevolutionary conclusions. Nevertheless, I always liked this novel, despite, or maybe, because of Dostoevsky's past and its service as a cautionary tale of the futility, at best, of fighting against authority. Of course, Dostoevsky came within a ready hangman's noose for his own radical activity so that might color his approach, at least a little. Right? But Godard, who knows.
Book Review
The Possessed, Fyodor Dostovesky, Barnes & Noble, New York, 2004
Dostoevsky was a central figure in the great Russian literary revival of the 19th century, spurred on by the clearly foreseen, and necessary coming revolution that was on every radical intellectuals mind. The Russian novel, in a sense, reflected, in one way or another, the propaganda written for that event. This novel, moreover, forms the intellectual backdrop for a review that I have recently done on Jean Luc-Godard's "La Chinoise" from 1967. That film used the story line of the novel as the script for a modern day version of the struggle of a group of young middle class intellectuals driven to despair by the political/cultural/social and existential circumstances of their lives, yet were unable to fight effectively for their vision of the future, mainly due to their devotion to the "circle" spirit and distance from the class struggles of their times.
Thus from different centuries and responding to different sets of circumstances the film and novel come to the same basic conclusion about the futility of struggle against authority, or the fear that the "new order" will be just a rehash of the old led to both director and author to some very unrevolutionary conclusions. Nevertheless, I always liked this novel, despite, or maybe, because of Dostoevsky's past and its service as a cautionary tale of the futility, at best, of fighting against authority. Of course, Dostoevsky came within a ready hangman's noose for his own radical activity so that might color his approach, at least a little. Right? But Godard, who knows.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Photographer's Corner- The Great Depression Era Photographs of Dorothea Lange- A Book Review
Click on title to link to Jonathan Raban's "The New York Review Of Books" article reviewing Linda Gordon's "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits".
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
*Poet’s Corner- Early Soviet Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
Click on title to link to the Vladimir Mayakovsky Internet Archive to read some of his poems, especially from the famous "The Bedbug" volume.
Vladimir Mayakovsky 1922
You
Source: The Bedbug and selected poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Meridian Books, New York, 1960;Transcribed: by Mitchell Abidor.
You came –
determined, because I was large,
because I was roaring,
but on close inspectionyou saw a mere boy.
You seized and snatched away my heartand
beganto play with it –
like a girl with a bouncing ball.
And before this miracle
every womanwas either a lady astounded
or a maiden inquiring:
“Love such a fellow?
Why, he'll pounce on you!
She must be a lion tamer,a girl from the zoo!”
But I was triumphant.I didn’t feel it –the yoke!
Oblivious with joy,
I jumped and leapt about,
a bride-happy redskin,
I felt so elated and light.
Vladimir Mayakovsky 1922
You
Source: The Bedbug and selected poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Meridian Books, New York, 1960;Transcribed: by Mitchell Abidor.
You came –
determined, because I was large,
because I was roaring,
but on close inspectionyou saw a mere boy.
You seized and snatched away my heartand
beganto play with it –
like a girl with a bouncing ball.
And before this miracle
every womanwas either a lady astounded
or a maiden inquiring:
“Love such a fellow?
Why, he'll pounce on you!
She must be a lion tamer,a girl from the zoo!”
But I was triumphant.I didn’t feel it –the yoke!
Oblivious with joy,
I jumped and leapt about,
a bride-happy redskin,
I felt so elated and light.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Henrik Ibsen
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky-On Marcel Proust
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great French writer Marcel Proust. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Maxim Gorky
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Russian Poet Mayakovsky
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky-On George Bernard Shaw
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great British writer George Bernard Shaw. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Dostoevsky
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian writer Dostoevsky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Pushkin
Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian writer Pushkin. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Oppposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.
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